Category Archives: Media and Telecom Industry Analysis

Comcast’s announcement this week that video subscriber growth resumed late in 2013 after a multi-year drain drew cheers from investors who bid up the stock and praise from the prominent industry analyst Craig Moffett, who proclaimed Comcast has unseated DirecTV as the proud provider of the best pay-TV experience in the U.S. Continue reading Is housing the reason for Comcast’s rebound?→

The cable network that’s all about scary is trying to take some of the fear out of dynamic VOD advertising.

Fearnet and its national advertising rep, Los Angeles-based Sony Pictures Television, are first out of the gate in selling dynamic advertising positions in viewer-requested video streams that run over cable and telco-video systems.

So far, says Paul Brennan, Sony’s SVP of Advertising Sales, nobody has run away screaming from the pitch. Instead, Sony has sold campaigns on Fearnet VOD to a group of advertisers across consumer brand categories including automotive (Volvo and others), film (Relativity Media, Anchor Bay Entertainment and others) video games (EA and Capcom) and television brands including AMC and Starz Entertainment. “Because there’s a conscious decision of a viewer to be there, it’s a very strong place to advertise,” he says. Continue reading It’s alive! Dynamic ads are up, running…and not all that scary→

An advanced television advertising capability long pursued by the cable industry is starting to get some attention – and some traction.

It’s household addressability, or the ability to send to your neighbor who’s watching ESPN a different commercial message than the one you see at exactly the same time, on exactly the same channel, because you have different demographic or behavioral characteristics than the guy next door. Neat, huh?

With a new digital movie delivery service, Disney and Apple this week joined the burgeoning movement to cloud storage and retrieval of media stuff. Similar to the Ultraviolet platform that Disney has shunned in favor of its own solution, the Disney Movies Anywhere (DMA) service lets users buy and watch movies on digital devices, in this case iPads, iPhones and iPods. It’s sort of a Disney-fied, miniature version of iTunes, and if you sign up you get Disney’s animated feature “The Incredibles” for free.

One of the appealing elements of DMA, Ultraviolet and other digital delivery platforms like Amazon Instant Video and Apple TV is a warm and comforting acquiescence to the cloud. Thanks to the pairing of mega-server arrays and fast broadband connections to them, we’re quickly becoming liberated from the do-it-yourself handiwork of the old days, when we had to manage the downloading of files to devices or personal storage systems. Continue reading Making the case for digital downloads→

AT&T’s big bet on old-school video delivery technology testifies to an inescapable reality of the telecommunications scene: pay-TV still rules.

At a time when everybody’s rushing to plant a stake in the online video delivery business, the $48.5 billion-plus-debt deal to buy DirecTV signals the enduring economic power of a tried-and-true formula: charging millions of people $100 per month for packages of TV channels. Continue reading Ma Bell makes a big bet on legacy TV→

Nielsen’s latest take on how the American populace is shifting TV viewing habits is especially troubling (if your biz model has “legacy” written on it, at least) from a standpoint of youthful demographics. While Americans at large spent two fewer minutes per week watching traditional television during the third quarter of 2014 versus two years ago, viewing time among 18-24 year-olds plunged nearly 22 percent over the same time period.

Increasingly, the Internet is a thing of air and invisibility. The International Telecommunications Union estimates mobile broadband connections are growing at a double-digit pace globally, compared to slowing growth of 4.4 percent for fixed networks. Already, there are nearly 2.4 billion mobile broadband subscriptions in the world, ITU believes.

Even among developed nations, where fixed broadband tends to be more prevalent, wireless Internet reigns supreme. Among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, there were 330 million fixed broadband connections in place at the end of last year, versus 900 million mobile broadband units, according to OECD. Continue reading Wired Internet access is starting to look so 2013→

Most investors still seem to believe the market-reshaping Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger will happen. But as this New York Times analysis points out, the betting line is shifting, with some saying the odds of completion are now slightly lower.